Salman Rushdie hails cockroach protests as India’s ‘most hopeful moment’ in a long time
Salman Rushdie hails cockroach protests as India’s ‘most hopeful moment’ in a long time
Namita SinghSun, October 18, 2026 at 9:46 AM UTC
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Acclaimed writer Sir Salman Rushdie and filmmaker Mira Nair have extended their support for India’s “cockroach” protest movement, after a police crackdown on the group’s leadership.
India has seen weeks of major street protests, first ousting the country’s education minister and then demanding the resignation of its chief election commissioner over a controversial revision of voter rolls.
The movement has galvanised opposition to prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP, with major students’ unions and opposition parties calling a series of marches that have led the authorities to lock down central Delhi.
Speaking at a fundraising dinner for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York, Sir Salman called the protests India’s “most hopeful moment” in a long time.
“There is something going on in India right now. India is boiling,” said the Satanic Verses author. “And I would feel wrong not to say, maybe not the thing to say in a restaurant, to celebrate the cockroach. Young people of India have given us the most hopeful moment for a very long time.”
The gathering took place on Wednesday and included a celebration of Nair’s birthday. The filmmaker, who is also the mother of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, described herself as a “cockroach mom” and expressed solidarity with those fighting for the country’s democracy, according to writer Amitava Kumar’s account of the event in a post on his Substack.
New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani celebrates alongside his mother Mira Nair (AFP/Getty)
Sir Salman has spoken in the past about his concerns over “attacks on free speech and rising Hindu nationalism” in the country of his birth.
Kumar wrote that the Booker Prize winner discussed growing up in the Indian city of Mumbai, then Bombay. “Salman said when he was growing up in Bombay, the festivals were for all of us. It didn’t matter whether we were Hindus, Muslims, Sikh, Christian, Parsi. We all celebrated everything.”
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Kumar wrote: “This spirit was alive in the gathering last evening but, Salman suggested, perhaps this feeling was no longer alive in that way in India any more.”
Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), was released on Saturday, a day after being detained while he was trying to participate in a march in the Indian capital.
The movement published a photo of him on X saying: “Abhijeet Dipke is a free man.”
He was released after agreeing to certain conditions, said CJP’s legal affairs chief Ratna Singh on social media, without elaborating on what they were.
Mr Dipke was produced before a special executive magistrate on Saturday afternoon, before being released.
Mr Dipke said on Instagram that he “knew going to jail was inevitable” and that he was ready to face “whatever comes my way”.
“Because the day I decided to come back to India, I placed my fate in the hands of the people of India and the Constitution of this country,” he said, referring to his return from the US, where he was studying for a masters degree in public relations.
Last month Sir Salman sat down with The Independent’s editor-in-chief Geordie Greig for an interview marking the launch of a new documentary on the assassination attempt that left him blind in one eye, Knife.
In it, he spoke about looking forward to the end of “brilliant liar” Donald Trump’s time as US president, saying: “I look forward to the day when there is no more Trump and every ugly thing he's built gets torn down.”
Source: “AOL Breaking”
